Hong Kong takes Internet speed title

Hackers log in at the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) congress on December 28, 2012 in Hamburg, Germany.

Story highlights

Hong Kong fastest for peak connection speeds, past 50 Mbps

South Korea, Japan also lead global rankings compiled by Akamai

It's likely someone from Hong Kong has just beaten you to this story.

The city was found to have the highest average peak connection speed of just over 54 megabits per second during the third quarter of 2012, according to analysis by Akamai Technologies.

It's the first time speeds have shot past 50 Mbps and, if the global trend continues, it's just going to get faster. While there was a slight drop in pace over the quarter, over the year average peak speeds surged 36%.

The United States straggled in in 14th place with 29.6 Mbps. The U.S. state with the fastest connection is still Delaware with a swift 10.9 Mbps, although the District of Columbia is catching up.

For the fastest average connection speeds in Europe, head over to Switzerland (8.7 Mbps), which just beats the Netherlands (8.5 Mbps) to second, while the Czech Republic (7.7 Mbps) is in third.

The place NOT to be for speedy downloads is China. Despite a 21% jump in connection speed during the quarter, the country's average peak connection reached just 7.1 Mbps. That makes it the slowest in Asia and gives it a lowly global rank of 123.

For consistency, South Korea was the best place to log on, boasting the highest average connection speed of 14.2 Mbps. Japan came second at 10.7 Mbps and Hong Kong third with a surprisingly sluggish 8.9 Mbps.

Once again, China was found to be the single largest source of attack traffic -- 33% -- during the quarter. Attacks from the country doubled during the period, a statistic the report described as "somewhat surprising."

The United States and Russia came next in the top three. In all, the top 10 countries were responsible for almost three quarters of global attacks.

Akamai releases its report every quarter, based on information gathered from 680 million unique IP addresses connected to its cloud platform.